It is Sunday morning and I really shouldn’t be blogging, but I just have time to share a couple of working papers with you.

First on the list yet another great paper from my friend Bob Hetzel at the Richmond Fed – “A Comparison of Greece and Germany: Lessons for the Eurozone?”

Here is the abstract:

During the Great Recession and its aftermath, the economic performance of Greece and Germany diverged sharply with persistent high unemployment in Greece and low unemployment in Germany. A common explanation for this divergence is the assumption of an unsustainable level of debt in Greece in the years after the formation of the Eurozone while Germany maintained fiscal discipline. This paper reviews the experience of Greece and Germany since the creation of the Eurozone. The review points to the importance of monetary factors, especially the intensification of the recession in Greece starting in 2011 derived from the price-specie flow mechanism described by David Hume.

It is incredible that Bob continues to write great and insightful papers on monetary matters and this paper is no exception. By the way Bob is celebrating 40 years at the Richmond Fed this year.

Second (and third) are two papers by Andrew Jalil. First a paper he has co-authored with Gisela Rua – “Inflation Expectations and Recovery from the Depression in 1933: Evidence from the Narrative Record”.

Here is the abstract:

This paper uses the historical narrative record to determine whether inflation expectations shifted during the second quarter of 1933, precisely as the recovery from the Great Depression took hold. First, by examining the historical news record and the forecasts of contemporary business analysts, we show that inflation expectations increased dramatically. Second, using an event-studies approach, we identify the impact on financial markets of the key events that shifted inflation expectations. Third, we gather new evidence—both quantitative and narrative—that indicates that the shift in inflation expectations played a causal role in stimulating the recovery.

It is clear to see both the influence of Christina Romer and Barry Eichengreen in the paper, but mostly I am reminded of Scott Sumner‘s unpublished book on the Great Depression.

I very much like the narrative approach to analysis of “monetary events” where you combine news from for example newspapers or magazines (or these days Google Trends) with the financial market reaction to such news – an approach utilized both in this great paper and in Scott’s Great Depression book.

Such approach captures the impact of expectations in the monetary transmission mechanism much better than traditional econometric studies of monetary policy shocks. As Scott Sumner often has argued – monetary policy works with longer and variable leads – as a consequence it might not make sense to look at present money base and money supply growth or interest rates. Instead we should be looking at expectations of changes in monetary policy. By combining newsflow from the media with information from financial markets we can do that.

The conclusion from the Jalil-Rua paper by the way very much is that monetary policy can be highly potent and that expectations are key for the transmission of monetary shocks.

Marcus Nunes, David Glasner and Mark Thoma also comment on the Jalil-Rua paper.

The other Jalil paper is a paper – Comparing tax and spending multipliers: It is all about controlling for monetary policy – from 2012 that I discovered when Googling Jalil. It is at least as interesting as his paper with Rua and it is on the topic of fiscal austerity and the importance of the monetary policy regime for the size of fiscal multipliers.

Here is the abstract:

This paper derives empirical estimates for tax and spending multipliers. To deal with endogeneity concerns, I employ a large sample of fiscal consolidations identified through the narrative approach. To control for monetary policy, I study the output effects of fiscal consolidations in countries where monetary authorities are constrained in their ability to counteract shocks because they are in either a monetary union (and hence, lack an independent central bank) or a liquidity trap. My results suggest that for fiscal consolidations, the tax multiplier is larger than the spending multiplier. My estimates indicate that whereas the tax multiplier is roughly 3—similar to the recent estimates derived by Romer and Romer (2010), the spending multiplier is close to zero. A number of caveats accompany these results, however.

You really shouldn’t be surprised by these empirical results if you have been reading market monetarist blogs as we – the market monetarists – have for a long time been arguing that if the central bank is targeting either inflation or nominal GDP (essentially aggregate demand) then there will be full monetary offset of fiscal austerity.The so-called fiscal cliff in the US in 2013 is a good example. Here fiscal austerity was fully offset by the expectation of monetary easing from the Federal Reserve.

This of course is really not different from the results in a standard New Keynesian model even though self-styled “Keynesians” often fails to recognise this. But don’t just blame Keynesians – often self-styled anti-Keynesians also fail to appreciate the importance of the monetary regime for the impact of fiscal policy.

More challenging of standard Keynesian thinking is in fact that Jalil shows that even when we don’t have monetary offset the public spending multiplier appears to be close to zero, while there is a strongly negative tax multiplier. That means that governments should rely on spending cuts rather than on tax hikes when doing austerity.

And finally I should note this Sunday that Hypermind has launched a couple of new prediction markets that should be of interest to most people in the finanial markets. The new markets are a U.S. presidential election prediction market and one on whether we will see Grexit in 2015 and one on whether EUR/USD will hit parity.

Enjoy the reminder of the weekend – tomorrow I am heading to Poland for a couple speaking engagements. I think I will be spreading a rather upbeat message on the Polish economy.

—–

If you want to hear me speak about these topics or other related topics don’t hesitate to contact my speaker agency Specialist Speakers – e-mail: daniel@specialistspeakers.com or roz@specialistspeakers.com.